


Sweet And Sombre Pigeon Wings

by ygrainette



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Background Castiel (Supernatural), Canon-Typical Violence, Case Fic, Past Ruby/Sam Winchester, Season/Series 05
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-11
Updated: 2018-09-11
Packaged: 2019-07-11 02:13:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15962507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ygrainette/pseuds/ygrainette
Summary: Sam and Dean take a case in Nebraska. Dean drinks. Sam tries not to think about Ruby.





	Sweet And Sombre Pigeon Wings

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is about something that the show never really deals with, and is highly personal to me: how do you recover from a deeply fucked up and manipulative relationship that also featured genuine feelings? How do you square that circle afterwards?
> 
> It is set in early s5, after The End, but before any other major events of the season.
> 
> This fic contains references to alcoholism and oblique references to suicide. It also contains minor spoilers for The Godfather Part I.

He wakes up with the taste of her on his lips.

Jolts awake, sulphur and clove cigarettes burning on his tongue, and rams his knee hard into the dashboard. "Shit!"

"You okay there, dude?" Dean's eyebrows are raised in his signature expression of concern and suspicion. His knuckles are white on the steering wheel. Through the windscreen the night sky is just starting to bleed to blue-and-pink above the empty endless highway.

Right. He's with Dean again. In the car, somewhere in – Colorado. He thinks.

"Fine. Fine. Just a dream."

Dean grunts an acknowledgement, then adds, "Better not have put a dent in my dashboard."

Of course. The goddamn world is ending, but God forbid anyone damage his brother's car. Sam doesn't dignify that one with an answer. He stares out the passenger side window, watches the scrub and the distant mountains track by.

It had felt so real. Her hot mouth against his, hair tangled soft in his fingers. That sense of giddy anticipation that always came when he kissed her, the promise of an adrenaline rush like nothing else.

There's a long way to drive yet. They won't make it to Nebraska until the sun is high in the sky. He should try to sleep.

He rubs the grit from under his eyelids and flicks the radio on.

* * *

 

They fetch up in a two-stoplight town in Nebraska with a potential demon problem. Dean had asked him, at least half a dozen times on the way here, if he was _feeling up to_ the job. Meaning, of course, _are you going to go fall off the wagon and make me drive all the way back up to Sioux Falls to lock you in the panic room again?_ It had been a minor miracle of restraint to keep from turning one of those questions into a shouting match.

As they check into the motel five minutes down the highway, haul their shit into the room, he almost wishes that he had. That they were in the post-argument state of icy silence. Unpacking the Impala by pure muscle memory, not a word or glance between them.

But Dean is trying, that's the hell of the thing. Dean is _trying_. Making conversation, forcing smiles and half-laughs and jokes that are even shittier than usual. (Something Sam had hitherto thought impossible.)

It's not a bad show he's putting on. Might even work, except that no-one knows Dean like Sam does, and he can see the tension in his shoulders and the corners of his mouth and the unease in his eyes. He can catch the constant sideways glances Dean probably thinks are subtle.

Yeah, a good old-fashioned screaming fight would be easier. Rage would be easier. Sam's always known what to do with rage. It's practically a member of the family by now. But this?

This is suffocating.

When their duffels are inside and they've both sluiced off the grime of an all-night drive in the surprisingly decent shower, Sam suggests, "You wanna go grab some breakfast? There's a diner in town."

Dean hesitates, rubs at the back of his neck, making damp hair stick up in spikes. "Nah, man, I ate while you were knocking out the Z's. I'll stay here, clean the weapons. Bring me back a piece of pie though, yeah?"

"Sure."

He's out the motel room and starting down the road into town before he realises his brother just said no to food. That hasn't happened since … that time when Sam was eleven and Dad said he'd be gone for four weeks and the money ran out after six.

If he were a better brother, he'd be worried. If he were a better brother, he'd turn around and frogmarch Dean all the way to the goddamn diner.

He sticks his hands in the pockets of his work jacket and carries on walking. A bit of space will do them both good, anyways.

* * *

 

The diner is tiny and the vinyl tabletops are greasy and the coffee tastes like shit, but the pancakes taste great. He slathers them in half a jug of maple syrup, and thinks, amused, _Ruby would say I just ruined a stack of perfectly good pancakes._

Then he remembers and throws his fork down on the plate with a clatter.

Fucking Ruby.

"Get the fuck out of my head," he mutters under his breath.

When he looks up, the waitress – about five feet tall and seventeen years old, if that – is looking at him with saucer-wide eyes. Because, right, he's a strange man twice her size throwing his cutlery around and talking to himself. Like a crazy person. Real smooth, Winchester.

He hunches his shoulders a little, offers up his most guileless smile, the one he uses on grieving widows and concerned mothers and suspicious nurses in the emergency room. "Excuse me, ma'am? Could I get a slice of cherry pie, please? And – sorry. Drove all night, I'm just a bit frazzled this morning."

The girl, blushing a little at being called ma'am, says, "Oh, don't you worry about it, mister. One cherry pie, coming right up." And away she vanishes.

Sometimes it kills him, how easy it is to manipulate people.

* * *

 

On the way back to the motel, cherry pie in hand, he stops in at the grocery store for a pack of Marlboro Lights. He hasn't smoked since just after Dean went to Hell, but in the last few weeks the craving has come awake under his skin again.

As soon as he's outside again he fishes the lighter out of his left boot and shakes out a cigarette. Holds it in the vice of his first two fingers and brings it up to his lips, inhales blue-grey smoke.

The taste is a shock to him. Somehow, he was expecting something different. Waiting for something different.

He smokes like he always used to, urgently. By the time the smouldering butt is crushed beneath his heel, he knows he was wrong. This isn't what he's been missing, what he's been itchy with wanting. Clove cigarettes would be closer, but still not right.

He wants her.

Her.

He closes his eyes on the bright morning sun and lets himself remember. Just for a moment. The way the soft skin of her inner arm or her thigh, would part for the knife, the electrifying taste of her blood coppery on his tongue. The press of her ankles at the small of his back, tugging him deeper inside her with every thrust. How she'd kiss, with her whole body, as if everything she had was focused on nothing but this.

God, he loved to kiss her.

A car speeds past him, heading south on the highway, shaking him out of the memory. He drags a hand through his hair and puts the Marlboros away. Time to go back.

* * *

 

When he lets himself into the motel room, Dean is sitting at the table with the guns in pieces in front of him. There is a distinct smell of whiskey in the air.

"Aw yeah, you got the pie," Dean says brightly, then his nostrils flare and his eyes narrow. "Were you smoking again, Sam?"

For Christ's sake. "Did you have a liquid breakfast, Dean?"

Dean waves the retort away with a casual hand. "Those things'll kill you, you know it?"

"Yeah, if the freaking Apocalypse doesn't get there first." Suddenly he can't stand being in yet another anonymous motel room with his brother for another minute. "I'm going outside. You wanna actually work this case, come get me."

Outside, he perches on the steps up to the motel room. Listens to the hum and plink of the ice machine. Watches the movements of the little birds perched on the wires running down the street. Pigeons are one of those constants, always the same, no matter what state you're in.

It's tempting to have another cigarette just to spite Dean, but this isn't a fight Sam wants to prolong.

He's felt the weight of Dean's love for him all his life, but since he was twenty-three it has been not a comfort but an albatross around his neck. Since he stood in a musty cabin in South Dakota with a fresh scar across his spine and understood that he had been lying _dead_ on that bed. He had died, and Dean had made a suicide pact to bring him back.

(The logical conclusion: if Dean had been unable to make a deal at the crossroads, he would have taken a more direct route. Most likely, his trusty nickel-plated Colt.)

That level of consuming, tunnel-vision need, it's not something Sam is equipped to deal with. Not something he can stand to think about.

After some time, the door behind him swings open then closed. Dean walks up to stand beside him. If this was before everything got so fucked up – before Sam fucked everything up – Dean would have smacked his shoulder or nudged him or something. He doesn't.

"Okay, kiddo, let's go chat up some witnesses."

"Okay."

Sam's knees pop as he stands up.

* * *

 

The evening finds them breaking into a house on the edge of town that was the scene of a triple homicide two nights ago. After a day spent lying to the neighbours, the local PD, and the family, watching the grandmother rock back and forth on her couch as she cried, and analysing it all for clues, Sam's glad to finally be _doing_ something. So damn glad.

He picks the lock on the back door while Dean keeps lookout, pretending to fiddle innocently with his phone. Despite best efforts he still looks shady as fuck, but then it's unfair to expect Dean not to look shady, because he very much _is_.

Places like this, their greatest ally is people's trusting nature and belief that their neighbours are generally good people and not trying to rob them blind. Couldn't get away with this in New York City.

A satisfying _click-clunk_ and the door opens under his fingertips. "We're in," Sam says, mock-dramatic.

His grin goes unanswered. Dean eyeballs him, nonplussed, and as he edges past Sam into the house Sam goes suddenly cold because, fucking hell, that was an in-joke with him and _Ruby_. Talking like computer hackers in the shitty heist films she inexplicably loved. Of course Dean's not going to fucking get it. Christ. How do you forget something like that?

"Are you coming in or what?" Dean hisses at him.

"Yes – yes, Dean, jeez." It comes out harsher than he'd intended but that's the story of his life right now, isn’t it?

Dean shuts the door behind them, gives Sam a brief flash of that suspicious-concern look but doesn't say anything. Digs his flashlight out of his pocket and lifts an eyebrow in the way that means: _split up_?

Sam jerks his chin: _yeah_. Dean peels off to the left, taking the living room and leaving Sam the kitchen. Bastard.

It's like stepping into the Marie Celeste. Everything frozen in time. There's still a skillet on the stovetop, a teenage girls' magazine open on the table, a half-drunk mug of coffee beside it. A chair tipped over on the floor, the green glass of a wine bottle in a thousand shards scattered around it.

Only the corpse is missing.

He approaches that negative space carefully, treading as lightly as it's possible to tread in steel-toed work boots. Crouched down, he scans his flashlight across the floor. Dried blood streaks across the checkerboard tiles and broken glass like a Jackson Pollock painting. It's nothing he hasn't seen before. Nothing he hasn't seen in a dozen cases that turned out to be good old-fashioned murders, no supernatural assistance needed.

Maybe Mommy Dearest just snapped and killed her husband and two kids under her own steam. Maybe there's no demons here at all, just another no-name smalltown with skeletons falling out of the closet. Now there's a cheery thought.

Then Dean whistles from the other room. Yeah, no such fucking luck.

Sam tiptoes his way back out of the kitchen, through into the living room, which looks like it's not been redecorated since the 1980s. There's no smell of sulphur, no visible signs of anything untoward really, and for a moment he thinks his brother's just being a dick.

"What? This better not be anything stupid –"

"Look at this."

"Huh."

Dean's holding up the telephone receiver, which is scorched and partly melted. When he flicks his flashlight toward the wall, the power point is also framed by sooty scorch marks.

" _Huh._ You reckon a demon blew out the phone?"

"Demon Mom smokes out in the middle of that 911 call, could do it. Right?"

"I _guess_ , but why no sulphur?"

"White-eyed one, maybe. They don't always leave sulphur behind."

They look at each other for a moment. Sam feels a phantom ache down his left side. The last time they came across a high ranked demon, back when they were failing to stop Lilith breaking all the Seals, he ended up with a lovely set of cracked ribs for his trouble.

"Come on, man, really? Don't you think they've got better things to be doing than killing a couple of kids in some Podunk town?"

"How the fuck should I know how these sons-of-bitches think?"

 _Well, you're the one who went to Hell,_ Sam thinks. He shrugs.

Dean opens his mouth, closes it again. Shakes his head. Doubtless swallowing his own dark thoughts. "Whatever, we'll do a summoning and then we'll know. Come on, let's beat it, this place is giving me the heebies."

"There could be more evidence upstairs, you don't know –"

"Sam, I am dog fucking tired, I'm starving, and I'm leaving. You wanna play Columbo, you do it on your own."

He's freaked out by the case, is what he is. Anything to do with mothers and Dean bugs out, and it's unfair on these poor dead people and their family. Sam crosses his arms. "Yeah, well, if you'd had anything but whiskey today, maybe you wouldn't be so –"

"Sam!" Dean snarls it, then closes his eyes, clenches his teeth. He starts again, in this tone of forced calm that’s actually kind of maddening. "Look, I don't want to fight about this. We can come back tomorrow night, just – come on, man, let's go. Okay?"

A large part of Sam does want to fight about this. Or, at least, to fight about _something_. He knows how to handle Dean when he's mad and spitting venom, when he's passive-aggressively snarky, when he's just plain in a shitty mood. Whatever this is? Nope.

But it's the Apocalypse, and nobody gets what they want. "Okay, Dean."

* * *

 

They eat at the tiny diner where he'd freaked out the teenage waitress. This time they're served by an older lady who smiles in a matronly fashion at Dean as he inhales two portions of corned beef hash _and_ a slice of apple pie. Sam's caught between exasperation and amusement.

When she brings the check, she lands a peck on Dean's cheek and his brother's attempt to drag up a flash of his usual flirtatious charm fails pathetically.

They drive back to the motel in silence.

 _The Godfather_ is on, and Dean proceeds to drink his way through a six-pack of beer and start in on the Jack Daniels even before Luca Brasi's sleeping with the fishes. Sam has no idea when his brother even got the chance to buy the damn beer.

He should say something about it. Something beyond sniping. Dean's drinking frenetically, like their father on a binge, but one that never ends, that never crashes into the wall of a hangover. He really should say something.

He should.

Dean falls asleep on top of the covers, fully clothed, boots still on, around the time Michael Corleone gets married in Sicily. That's been a habit of his since he came back from Hell, one that Sam's always found unaccountably unnerving.

Sam pulls his brother's shoes off, turns down the volume on the grainy TV set, and watches Vito die in the tomato garden without seeing.

His mouth is watering, his skin itching. If only – if his own addiction was only that easy. If only it had sedated him, smoothed off his rough edges, rather than throwing everything into hyperreal colour, every thought electrified, every breath ecstatic.

If only it hadn't led here.

He roots through his pockets, retrieves the crumpled packet of Marlboros, and blows smoke up at the stained ceiling.

Thinks he'll hate Ruby forever for doing this to him. To his brother. To them both.

* * *

 

He dreams of her, of course.

He dreams of the time they drove up north, and sat on the hood of the Impala, looking out across the glassy dark water of Lake Superior. It was one of the nights the Perseid meteor shower was at its height, and when they saw the first streak of light, Ruby had grabbed his hand and yelled in surprise. As though she were any girl.

They'd kissed, then.

He dreams, also, of waking up in the dawn, spread out on a blanket on the ground in front of the car. She, of course, was awake. She was lying beside him, her head on his chest, dark hair flowing down his torso, one hand resting on his neck, as she gazed up at the sky.

* * *

He wakes, still with the sense memory of Ruby's sweet-smelling hair heavy on his chest, that little hand pressed against the pulse of his throat. As if, when he turns over, the cheap motel sheets would be warm with her presence.

Without thought, without conscious decision, he punches the mattress. And again, and again. Hard, with all his weight, all his force behind it.

All that – lying next to him as though they were truly lovers, waiting in her demonic wakefulness for him to rouse, gasping at the shooting stars – all of that was manipulation. All an act to lead him down the road to Lucifer. All of it. And he knows. He heard it straight from the Hellmouth herself, saw her insane triumph, the psychotic gleam in her eyes when she told him it was all lies –

What kind of man misses that?

_She never loved you._

What kind of sick, idiot, _victim_ , misses the person who made them into a tool?

_You fucking masochist, Winchester._

But – some traitor part of him says – maybe it wasn't all an act. Maybe that night was real. Maybe some of the emotion she seemed to show, sometimes when her midnight eyes flicked back to caramel after climax, maybe the act was so enthralling because it was built on reality.

_Yeah, and maybe you fucking deserved it. If you believe that._

This time he punches the wall, hard enough to feel the shock up to his shoulder.

"Sammy? You okay? What –"

"Yeah. Yeah, I'm – I'm fine, dude. Go shower."

* * *

 

The options for demon-summoning-ritual spaces are kinda limited in a town this tiny, but there's a boarded-up grocery store on the outskirts, and the parking lot out back will do. Or, more accurately, will have to do.

As his brother chalks out the sigils on the cracked tarmac, Sam thinks of all the dumbass places he's done rituals. This is probably up there. All it would take is someone driving down the road and they'd be calling the Sherriff to tell him, those FBI boys? They're out there worshipping the Devil. Getting run out of town at 2 AM never loses its fun.

"You ready, dude?"

"What – yeah. Yeah, let's go."

Dean eyes him, sceptical but ultimately too hungover to pursue it. "Awesome." He pockets the chalk, swings his salt-loaded shotgun off his shoulder. "Let's rock and roll."

Sometimes Sam doesn't know who the fuck his brother thinks he's kidding.

* * *

 

By now, five years deep in the life, the Latin of a summoning spell rolls off Sam's tongue. No hesitation, no breaks in the momentum. And by now, eighteen months since his first taste of Ruby's blood, he can feel the veil growing thinner with each word. A membrane stretching to its limits.

"… _in nomine Patris, Filii, et Spiritus Sancti,"_ he says, and sulphur fills the air as the veil breaks.

The candle flames flare, leaping high and burning ghosts onto his retinas. Standing in the centre of the parking lot is a college-age boy, hair bleached blond and eyes white as a void.

"Little Sammy Winchester, I should have known," the kid purrs in a voice unmistakably _ancient_ , and Sam is just bracing himself for one of those psychoanalytic speeches demons love to give, when Dean lets fire with his sawed-off. Then several things happen in very quick succession.

As the deep shotgun boom rings out, the demon hurls itself forward with incredible, preternatural speed. It hits the deck, rolls and is up again, just a blur. Eyes flaring and face contorted as it snarls in outrage. "Oh, this is going to be fun."

His brother's cursing, fumbling to reload – Sam has Ruby's knife in his hand by pure reflex – sweat cold down his back – he's never seen a demon move so fast, they are _fucked_ – and he lunges.

The demon dodges under his swing, comes up chest-to-chest and hits him in the face, point blank range. Stars explode red and white across his vision and he goes down. Head cracking off tarmac. Then the thing is on top of him, slim fingers a vice around his neck.

It's saying things his jangled, reeling brains can't make sense of. He grips its arms as hard as he can, thinks, _hurry it the fuck up_.

Then Dean plunges Ruby's knife straight through its throat.

Orange light flashes through and behind those empty white eyes, the stolen face translucent for a moment, lightning and smoke flickering behind it like the worst California bushfire Sam ever saw. A glimpse of the Pit.

A half-second later, the light goes out, and the pressure is gone from Sam's throat. Those first few breaths burn all the way down into his thirsty lungs.

Dean drags the body off of him, sticks the knife through his belt, and helps him up, a difficult process that makes everything spin quite violently.

"You better go sit in the car, Sammy, that was quite a whack you took to your old grapefruit," Dean says, and is unimpressed by his counter-arguments. He more-or-less frogmarches Sam over to the Impala, sits him down in the passenger seat, finds a chemical ice-pack somewhere in one of the footwells, cracks it and puts it on his cheekbone. "Now – hold that – stay there while I go take a li'l evening walk with our corpse over there, huh?"

He should protest – it's going to take his brother fucking ages to dispose of the body on his own – but the ice-pack feels so good pressed against his pounding skull, and the world is still revolving in drunken lurches. Maybe discretion is the better part of valour right now. He lets Dean walk away, tips his head back against the cracked leather seat, and closes his eyes.

* * *

Dean is gone what seems like a very long time.

Sam's thoughts keep returning, unbidden, to the way the demon's face had gone rigid with agony, then slack in death, as it loomed over him. The feel of its weight falling on him.

How it hadn't thought to question why he was holding on to it, not fighting it off him.

And he thinks of the way Ruby had no fear turning her back on him, no fear when he gripped her arms and held her to him, no fear until the moment his brother impaled her on her own knife.

What does it take for a demon to trust someone like that?

He remembers the weight of the white-eyed demon falling on his chest as he gasped for air, and he remembers feeling the sudden weight of the woman he had believed he loved in his hands. He remembers letting her fall to the floor. Like so much meat. One more monster, ganked.

Sometimes he wishes he hadn't done that, or that she'd just smoked out and vanished. Sometimes he wishes he'd stabbed her himself.

Right now, all he wants is for his head to stop hurting, and to sleep. To sleep, and never dream again.

* * *

"Sam. Sam!"

He wakes to Dean slapping the un-punched side of his face. Wakes in limb-flailing disorientation.

" _Fucking –"_

"Easy, kiddo, easy." Dean looks like hell himself, pale with tiredness, hands covered in dirt and leaving smears down his cheeks when he rubs his face. Digging a grave solo does that to a person. "Guess you were knocking out the z's when I was done tidying up, let you snooze all the way back to the motel. Took a minute to wake you up. Might've panicked a bit."

"Yeah, Dean, I think you might have," Sam says. He gets out of the car slowly, carefully. He can already tell this is gearing up to be one of those concussions he feels through his entire body.

Dean insists on holding his elbow as they make their way back into the motel. "I thought you were – that I was, y'know, gonna have to haul ass to a frigging hospital. Or call Cas, get him to come lay some angel mojo on you."

 _You'd love an excuse for that, huh,_ Sam thinks. "Well, I'm fine. Just … concussed and fucking tired."

"Yeah, I guess I'm getting no help driving tomorrow, huh?"

"Damn straight," Sam says, and manages the last few steps across the motel room before he collapses face first onto his bed. He kicks off his boots and burrows into the threadbare blankets.

Above him, his brother makes some noise, half-amused, half-concerned. He ruffles Sam's hair, which Sam hates even when Dean's hands aren't covered in mud, treating him like he's still a snotty six-year-old who needs babysitting. But he doesn't have it in for this fight tonight, not tonight.

He falls asleep to the sounds of Dean singing off-key in the motel shower.

* * *

When he wakes, his mind is clearer, and his head is even more painful. He can feel every beat of his pulse through the bruise rising on his cheekbone where the boy with the white eyes hit him. If it looks half as bad as it feels, he won't be talking up witnesses for a good couple of weeks.

Groaning, he sits up, and thankfully the world doesn't spin.

"Oh, you're up."

His brother is sitting on the other bed. For once he doesn't smell like he's had Jack Daniels for breakfast. Next to him is Castiel, the shadows under his eyes deeper than ever. What looks like one of Dean's tattered _Uncanny X-Men_ comics is spread out across his lap. Their shoulders and knees are touching.

"Hi, Cas," Sam says, doing his best to sound normal.

"Hello, Sam," Cas says. He, obviously, has no idea that anything about this situation is weird. Poor bastard, only having Dean to teach him about social norms. "Your brother was concerned your head injury was more serious than it appeared. I can reassure you both, it's not. You'll make a full recovery."

"Uh – thanks. Good to know." He kicks his way out of the blankets and stands up. Gives his brother a meaningful look. "I'm just gonna go freshen up, guys."

When he emerges from the motel bathroom, doubtless sporting a new case of athlete's foot from the distinctly dubious tile, Cas is gone. Figures.

"So, you got time to teach Cas about Storm and Wolverine, but not to get him some clothes that aren't flasher-chic?"

Dean glares at him. The effect is somewhat ruined by the pink tips of his ears. "Yeah, yeah, yeah, very fucking funny. Get your stuff in the damn car, Sleeping Beauty, I wanna be out the state by two."

It's strongly tempting to laugh, to pick at the thread, to refuse to let it drop. But he figures the only way they're managing to live with each other, still, after everything, is letting things drop. Averting their eyes. Letting each other avoid tearing off their bandaids.

* * *

"Where you figure we oughta head next?"

"Up to Sioux Falls, crash with Bobby for a bit. You need to get out from under that concussion before we get into another fight." His brother eyes him and adds, "And let that shiner fade before we book into any more motels."

"Yeah, I get that."

Sam sits back in the passenger seat, watches the birds on the wires as they flash by overhead. Tries not to think of the smell of sulphur, the taste of blood, and of clove cigarettes.


End file.
